Rating: 
Summary: Like medicine
Review: Faulkner has to be the most overrated writer in literary history. This book is aimless, uninteresting and tedious to levels unheard of. But "literary" people see it as their duty to enjoy this novel at all costs, for Faulkner has been championed as our answer to Joyce, Woolf, Proust, who all, alas! soar above him. Nobody enjoys reading Faulkner but it is "good for you" somehow, and thus this book will be painfully read for a long time to come.
Rating: 
Summary: The Great American Novel
Review: Faulkner's most compelling trait is he doesn't tell a story--he involves the reader in it so the reader, in effect, pieces it together in his mind as he reads it. It's hard work, but hard work is always more rewarding than the slop that passes for much of fiction these days (as well as back then). Faulkner makes you work, and this brilliant story of a doomed Southern family is a brilliant allegory for the entire South. It's about the human condition, and no one explains and explores it better than Faulkner. Read it and you'll understand....
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Summary: Should be the second Faulkner book you read
Review: I've read all of Faulkner's work and I truly believe that those who find 'Absalom' hard to comprehend should start by first reading 'The Unvanquished'. It gives one a more comfortable, easier and firmer foothold in Yoknapatawpha County so that when "Absalom, Absalom" is read, one will better understand what the author is telling us....how it felt to BE southern at Quentin's time. All the promise and past glory, all the self-destruction and inner demise is there. "Intruder in the Dust" should be the third book to be read. Those three give you a priceless inside track into the works of Faulkner. His short stories, "A Rose for Emily" and "Tomorrow" show both sides of the southern social strata. These stories are both masterpieces yet easy for the new Faulkner reader to appreciate. Although "The Sound and the Fury" is used in many colleges as an introduction to Faulkner, I feel that choice is not good. That particular book, although popular with many, was far from his best work. His style went awry there, in my opinion. The heaviness of the dialect and the time in which the story took place is no way to introduce anyone to this marvelous writer. But of his complete body of work, "Absalom, Absalom" is the magnificent star and nobody should deny themselves the opportunity of reading this great contribution to American literature.
Rating: 
Summary: A Breath Of Fresh Air After Miss Scarlett & Miss Melly
Review: Gone With The Wind is good but this is great! Yes, it's a hard read, but I discovered a secret: Don't read the book from beginnning to end. Skip around a bit. That's the genius of this book. It's told like a family scandal is really told, bit by bit, piece by piece, by different people at different times in different ways. Some of its hearsay, some of it firsthand; like a REAL skeleton in a Deep Southern closet! When people get that, (and skip around), the book is a breeze to read. Besides that, it's a believeable piece about life during that era. Sutpen wrestling his slaves and having a mulatto daughter; Ellen fighting in the beginning but then giving up, giving out, and dying; Rosa being born in the right place at the wrong time; Charles De Saint Valery Bon relinquishing his whiteness for the blackness; Clytemnestra sitting and watching the rot and ruin of the family of the man who was both her father and master; Quentin's confusion about what the big deal was and why they all felt it necessary to involve him when he wasn't even BORN back in those days. There's someone for everyone to relate to. An excellent read, once you've read it three or four times to get the full scope of it.
Rating:
Summary: Patience, the greatest virtue
Review: This book -is- a difficult undertaking, but it's not meant to be that way. The key is patience. Some things aren't meant to be understood until maybe 200 pages after they're first mentioned. If you don't understand something when you first read it, don't think it's -your- fault, you're probably not meant to understand it just yet. This really is a fantastic book, different from any other book I've ever read. It totally changed my view on writing, and what quality writing is.
Rating:
Summary: Like it or not, the best American novel of the century
Review: Great Gatsby may deserve equal billing, but Absalom, Absalom is probably the best American novel of the century. For no other reason, it represents the culmination of all those techniques of perspective from Conrad through Woolf.
Rating:
Summary: A climb to the top
Review: In reading this thrilling, maddening book, I feel I've scaled the Mt. Everest of American literature. Or perhaps Olympus is the better analogy. How satisfying that the failure of Thomas Sutpen's great design should be so brilliantly realized in Faulkner's. Beyond its power as story, Absalom, Absalom is perhaps the most devastating statement ever written of our national tragedy, the legacy of black enslavement. What a book! What an experience!
Rating:
Summary: You will never look at literature the same.
Review: All other books you read after Absalom, Absalom! will be dull and boring. You MUST read the book twice though to fully understand what's going on. Faulkner is a genius. This book is spectacular because he uses the prose as part of the story, the way the story is told contributes to the story itself. Use Cliff Notes for reference if you have to, but make sure you read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Faulkner at his most inconsistent
Review: I love Faulkner. Both "As I Lay Dying" and "The Sound and the Fury" are two of my favorite books. But "Absalom, Absalom!" just loses it's purpose within itself. Some pages will make you stop and take in every careful word choice and image that Faulkner presents. Other pages will drive you mad with their tedious ramblings and indulgences. Sherve's series of questions that go on for paragraphs will infuriate you. If 30 pages were cut out of this book or rewritten, it could have been one of his best. If you love Falukner, it's worth a read. If you haven't gotten into him before, this is not the place to start.
Rating:
Summary: The best novel i have ever read.
Review: Like climbing Mt. Everest, requires extraordinary work and effort, but there is the incredible feeling of accomplishment at the summit. Ineffable saddness that once read, one will never be able to begin the process of piercing its mysteries again.
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